apple juice

Thomas Friedman’s excellent new op-ed, Flush with Energy, contains this startling stat:

Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

What are we doing here?

I don’t agree with everything position Obama takes, I think he could be even stronger in his plans to break our addiction to oil… but, it is pretty hard to tell Americans that “As president, I’m going to make gasoline $10 a gallon”.

Here’s Obama’s latest ad, “Hands”. I think it compares nicely with McCain’s plan for “more drilling”.

you have to click through to this article, just for the picture if nothing else: Gas-Tax Holiday = Cheap Votes

a gas-tax holiday is the worst idea i have ever heard. it will save you $30. it will create more profits for oil companies (as they raise prices to fill the gap), it will set back important transportation projects across the country, and it will encourage people to drive more, not less, creating more pollution and pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.

bad bad stupid stupid. we should do the exact opposite. raise the gas tax. raise it by a dollar and dedicate it to transit projects.

encourage people to drive less.

encourage people to drive smaller cars.

encourage people to take transit.

one more reason to not vote for the old politics of John McCain and Hillary Clinton. time for a change. don’t believe me?

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away

thomas friedman – “dumb as we wanna be“

Smog over Downtown, originally uploaded by ajc3.

Just arrived at Matt’s safe and sound. He’s in the shower, and Madeline is sleeping so I thought I’d post a quick picture. This was taken out of the window of the plane as we were landing. Downtown LA is barely visible in the smog.

I filled up my vehicle with BioDiesel Fuel today. A blend probably, since it’s still liable to snow at any time around here.

I haven’t filled up since February 22. I drove 550, mostly city, miles. I pumped just under 14 gallons. (40 mpg) The cost per gallon was $3.94.

We need to raise the gas tax, again.

Raising the gas tax is the only reasonable way we will be able to pay for fixing all of these roads, build adequate bridges, pay for buses, and continue to make progress on rail transit.

Now, I know that we just raised it a nickel. Big whoop. Raise it a dollar and dedicate it to rail transit. The day I can ride a street car or train to my job will be a happy, happy day. The day that I can take a streetcar to the train station and ride a train to Duluth in 1 1/2 hours or ride a train to Chicago in 4 hours will be a happy day.

California has a $10 billion dollar proposition on the ballot this fall to build high-speed rail between its major cities. This is the scale of regional investment that the Upper Midwest will need to make in the not-to-distant future.

Big SUVs, the suburbs, and cheap energy are on the way out, and we need to plan accordingly.

This is an excellent article. A great summary of why corn and grass ethanol is a bad idea.

The Great Corn Con -The Senate’s preposterous new ethanol bill.

Key quotes:

So, even if Congress mandated that all of America’s corn be turned into ethanol, it would yield only about 28.3 billion gallons, far less than the mandated volume. And, clearly, most of America’s corn is still going to be used for animal feed, family barbecues, and high-fructose corn syrup.

—

In May 2006, former CIA Director John Deutch, who’s now a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he claimed that producing enough ethanol from switch grass (a fast-growing plant that’s native to North America) would require vast amounts of acreage. Deutch estimated that producing enough cellulosic ethanol to replace 1 million barrels of oil per day—roughly equivalent to 22 billion gallons of ethanol per year—would require planting 25 million acres of land in switch grass. That’s an area about the size of Kentucky, or about 5 percent of the 440 million acres of cropland in the United States.

—

So, what about using more ethanol from sugar cane? Well, the United States could, at least in theory, grow more cane. But that wouldn’t make much sense, given that Brazil can produce it at far lower cost. And, thanks to pressure from farm-state senators, Congress has effectively limited the use of Brazilian ethanol with its $0.54 per-gallon tariff on foreign ethanol.

(Corn, Grass) Ethanol is not the answer!

I’m on various City of Minneapolis email lists, and I typically skim them over before sending them to the trash. Today’s update from Mayor Rybak caught my eye, given my earlier post about light bulbs. Maybe he’s a reader?

Anyway, from the newsletter:

Global climate change can’t be fought in isolation within the borders of Minneapolis, but I’m resolved that we collectively do much more than our part. We are moving ahead on our city-wide environmental sustainability plan that guides our aggressive work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the use of renewable energy sources, and my 2007 city budget adopted by the City Council includes new resources to ramp-up our efforts to directly engage the public on ways to help address climate change.

As a Minneapolis resident, you will be asked to do much more to reduce your energy consumption, but today I ask you to take one simple step towards that goal: this week change three of your light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs. If every household in the U.S. replaced just one light bulb with a compact fluorescent, it would equal the energy conservation of taking one million cars off the road. We all need to do much more, but in this first and possibly fleeting glimpse of a dramatically shortened winter, taking this one simple act together seems like the least we can do to protect this special place in which we are fortunate to live.

He also mentions a website, Minnesota’s Energy Challenge, where you can form teams and track your CO2 savings.

3 bulbs, that’s not so hard…

Tags: energy, environment

Resolution #1: Save Energy Wal-Mart has made it one of their goals, so should you!

As a way to cut energy use, it could not be simpler. Unscrew a light bulb that uses a lot of electricity and replace it with one that uses much less.

Power-Sipping Bulbs Get Backing From Wal-Mart This is an example where a company with government-like power throws its weight around and made a market-based decision to push an energy-saving, albeit consumer and producer unpopular, product. The "wal-mart" model will probably work here. But I’m still going to argue that we need to create a business environment to go green. There are producers of the bulbs in the article complaining that americans will lose jobs, etc. Well, create an incentive for those producers to switch to better technology! Keep the jobs here! It’s not like we’re uncapable of making CFLs. Too often companies will not choose the green route, but choose the entrenched route. Government has a role to play here, even though the market took care of it in this case. Wal-Mart made a decision that could be considered market-irrational, and not all companies have the strength to do that.

Tags: environment, energy, walmart